Stopping the Torture Business in Our
HometownsAn Interview With Christina Cowger of
North Carolina
Stop Torture Now by Ron Jacobs
www.dissidentvoice.org
February 1, 2007

I
recently ran across a brief article in one of the daily newspapers
here in North Carolina that described an effort by some of this
state's legislators to begin an investigation of Aero Contractors and
its involvement in the US government's rendition program. As most
readers know, this program involves kidnapping, detaining and
transporting individuals considered the enemy to prisons around the
world where they are then tortured and kept incommunicado for months
and years. The legislative effort is but one result of the efforts of
a group known as North Carolina Stop Torture Now. What follows is the
transcript of an email interview with Raleigh, NC resident and
long-time peace and justice activist Christina Cowger, who serves as
the group's coordinator.

Ron Jacobs:
Hello. Let me start by asking you to introduce yourself and the group?
How long have you been around? Are you connected to any church or
larger group?

Christina Cowger:
North Carolina Stop Torture Now (NC STN) began work in the fall of
2005. That was when activists from St. Louis brought the issue of
extraordinary rendition to our attention. With them, we carried out an
action of non-violent civil disobedience -- trespassing -- at the
headquarters of Aero Contractors in Smithfield, NC.

Without Aero Contractors and similar CIA
front companies, rendition literally wouldn't "get off the ground."
Aero uses publicly funded airport facilities in North Carolina as a
launching pad to help the CIA kidnap and torture people in various
parts of the world. Once we realized this, we couldn't ignore it. NC
STN is a grassroots coalition of educators, peace and human rights
activists, people of faith, students, and working people. We're not
particularly affiliated with any church or other group. Active in our
ranks are people from the ACLU, Amnesty International, Bill of Rights
Defense Committee, the Catholic Worker movement, CodePink, the Green
Party, the North Carolina Council of Churches, Peace Action, Quaker
House, Unitarian Universalist congregations, and various other faith
groups.

We started in the Triangle area, and
have built connections to people in eastern and western North
Carolina. Community activists working on the anti-Aero campaign
include members of Coastal Carolina Peace (Carteret County), the
Piedmont Centre for Peace and Justice (Winston-Salem), and

RJ:
What compelled your group to take on the issue of torture in
Guantanamo and other prisons around the world set up for that purpose?

CC:
The story of Khaled El-Masri, perhaps the best-known victim of
rendition, certainly galvanized a lot of us into action.
Those familiar with the history of U.S. involvement in Vietnam and
Central America know that the use of disappearance, torture, and
clandestine prisons is nothing new in U.S. covert operations. But it's
also clear that since 9/11, the CIA has carried out a massive
escalation in kidnapping and detention, completely outside the norms
of national and international law.

We see this as one of the Bush
Administration's most heinous abuses of power, although certainly not
the only one. It appalls us and many others that a national "debate"
about torture could even arise. To paraphrase journalist Mark Danner,
even if it could be shown that torture was effective, it's immoral,
and that's reason enough to fight against it. Further, CIA-sponsored
torture fuels the hatred of people all over the world for the U.S. and
its allies, which increases instability and makes everyone less safe.

What's wrong with rendition is not just
that most of the victims are tortured, although that's bad enough.
Rendition means "disappearing" people and detaining them indefinitely,
outside the rule of law.

RJ:
Can you provide the readers with an outline of how you understand the
renditions process to work?

CC:
Briefly, since 9/11 the rendition program was transformed into a
large-scale campaign to detain and interrogate those targeted in the
U.S. "war on terror" -- clandestinely and outside U.S. and
international law. Stephen Grey's book Ghost Plane provides a
meticulously documented account of rendition and its antecedents under
Clinton.

A typical rendition begins with a
Gulfstream executive jet taking off from the Johnston County Airport
in Smithfield, North Carolina. It is serviced and piloted by a crew
from Aero Contractors, which has a long history with the CIA. The
plane might stop near Washington, D.C., to take on a CIA "snatch"
team. The next stop would be in Europe to refuel, and then on to a
city in Europe or the Middle East, where the CIA team kidnaps the
suspect directly, or accepts custody of him from local police agents.
Dressed and masked in black, the CIA team beats, strips, searches, and
binds the prisoner, drugs him with an anal suppository, and then flies
him with Aero Contractors' help to a foreign jail.

Many of these detainees have been thrown
into notorious jails in Syria, Egypt, Uzbekistan, and Morocco, where
conditions are inhumane and torture is brutal. Some have ended up in
prisons run directly by the CIA -- the so-called "black sites" -- in
eastern Europe or Afghanistan. Many have been rendered from prison to
prison by Aero Contractors. In all cases, there is no due process, no
habeas corpus, no communication with family for months and even years.

RJ:
To your knowledge, is the United States still involved in renditions
and torture?

CC:
President Bush claimed in his September 6, 2006, speech that the
"black sites" had been emptied, and their inmates rendered to
Guantanamo. As Stephen Grey points out, this begs the question of what
happened to the hundreds of detainees who entered the rendition system
and remain missing.

The Military Commissions Act, passed by
a gutless Congress before the 2006 fall elections, gave Bush a
significant victory. Under the MCA, if you are declared an enemy
combatant, you lose your habeas corpus rights. This is true whether or
not you are a U.S. citizen, although it will no doubt be applied
mainly to non-citizens. Given this victory, we guess that Bush and the
CIA feel emboldened to continue the extraordinary rendition program.
Of course, it is difficult to confirm this directly.

RJ:
What is the role of private business in this process? Who pays them?
What role does the CIA play, if any? The reason I ask that is because
this all reminds me of the Air America saga in Vietnam and Laos and
Southern Air Transport in Nicaragua -- both front corporations for the
CIA.

CC:
In fact, Aero Contractors was founded by a former chief pilot of Air
America, Jim Rhyne, in the late 1970s. According to Stephen Grey in
Ghost Plane (p 125-126), Aero pilots have flown "both declared and
undeclared missions for the drug war in Colombia, helped supply the
Contra rebels in Nicaragua, and had taken weapons and food to the
UNITA rebel leader, Jonas Savimbi, in Angola."

A network of private front companies
helps the CIA maintain flexibility and deniability in the "war on
terror." Besides Aero, there are Premier Executive Transport Services
in Dedham, MA; Devon Holding and Leasing; and a variety of other
company names. As Grey explains, the point of

having these civilian fronts is "to have
a 'cutout' -- a trail that would lead an investigator to a brass plate
by a lawyer's office entrance, but no farther."

In Portland, Oregon, a retired political
science professor named Michael Munk has challenged one of these
fronts, Bayard Foreign Marketing. At his urging, the Oregon Bar
Association is investigating whether an attorney named Scott Caplan is
guilty of professional misconduct for representing a fake client, "Leonard
Bayard" -- a person who does not actually exist the. One of
the Gulfstream jet used in renditions was owned by "Bayard."

I should mention that, in addition to
shell companies, other better-known companies also profit from
rendition. For example, Boeing has a subsidiary called Jeppesen
International Trip Planning that plans the rendition flights for the
CIA. Activists in San Jose, where Jeppesen is headquartered, have been
protesting:
Act Against Torture and South Bay Mobilization
-- tel: (408)998-8504.

RJ:
What can you tell us about the attempt by some North Carolina state
legislators to get that state's Bureau of Investigation to investigate
Aero Contractors? What caused these legislators to take an interest in
this issue?

CC:
In addition to generating media coverage to help expose Aero and
rendition, we went to North Carolina's Governor Mike Easley (D) early
on. We met with his Chief of Staff and provided extensive background
information. One of our main points was that North Carolina taxpayers
are in essence hosting a "torture taxi." In addition to its corporate
HQ at the Johnston County Airport, Aero is also a tenant at the Global
TransPark (GTP) in Kinston, where it houses a Boeing 737 tied to many
rendition flights. The GTP is a publicly supported economic
development project.

Governor Easley put the matter to an old
friend and legal advisor, Andy Vanore, who told us he advised the
Governor to do exactly nothing. Mr. Vanore's reasoning was, literally,
that President Bush and North Carolina's Republican Senators all said
the U.S. does not torture. Sure enough, Governor Easley took Mr.
Vanore's advice, and did nothing.

We met with the GTPA board as a whole,
and with their vice-chair, Gene Conti. They also declined to take
action. We then took our case to several state legislators, and they
became concerned that Aero might stain the state's reputation. In
October 2006, 12 state representatives sent a letter to NC SBI
Director Robin Pendergraft, asking that she investigate Aero for
suspected conspiracy to kidnap and torture. Ms. Pendergraft responded
tersely that she lacked jurisdiction -- the case was a matter for the
FBI.

In January 2007, 22 state senators and
representatives wrote to NC Attorney General Roy Cooper, Ms.
Pendergraft's boss. They rebutted Ms. Pendergraft's claim that the
state cannot investigate, giving examples to the contrary. Our state
SBI recently investigated a lottery commissioner who ended up
answering to the federal crime of mail fraud, and acted on a tip to
investigate North Carolina peddlers of child pornography who were
sentenced under federal laws prohibiting distribution via the
Internet. While it is likely that Mr. Cooper will also decline to
investigate Aero, as this would mean crossing swords with the CIA, it
is also clear that the refusal would be selective and political.

We expect that more leaders of our
state's political, religious, and legal communities will become
concerned and speak out against North Carolina hosting a "torture
taxi."

RJ:
What is Aero's suspected role? How did people discover this role? What
kind of charges can be brought against them should the investigation
find anything?

CC:
Aero's role is to maintain and equip the planes, and supply the pilots
and flight crews for the rendition flights. Their role was uncovered
by journalists using information from planespotters -- people who hang
out near airports with binoculars, writing down planes' tail numbers,
and then publish this information on the Web. Also, the Federal
Aviation Administration provides data on the movements of airplanes on
aviation web sites.

Steven Edelstein, an attorney familiar
with the Aero case, has pointed out that, under North Carolina law, an
agreement to commit an unlawful act is a conspiracy. If a person who
is part of the agreement flies a plane or orders another to fly a
plane within the jurisdiction of the State of North Carolina, then
that person may be guilty of a conspiracy to commit a felony or a
misdemeanor. It is not necessary that the unlawful act (e.g., the
kidnapping) take place within the State of North Carolina.

The unlawful crimes are numerous.
First-degree kidnapping, felonious restraint, and false imprisonment
are a few of the substantive offenses. In addition, there are a myriad
of assault violations.

North Carolina law also requires anyone
in charge of a state agency, such as the Global TransPark where Aero
maintains a hangar in Kinston, to report possible criminal violations
to the State Bureau of

Investigation.

RJ:
What do you hope to see as the outcome of this action against Aero?

CC:
We know that shutting down Aero will require sustained effort. Many of
North Carolina's political leaders are oblivious to the moral issues
surrounding rendition. But we hope they may eventually respond to
sustained pressure, and to negative local and national publicity.

It's also clear that Aero is only one
piece of an extensive torture network that includes many private
contractors and perhaps portions of our military apparatus. It's
probably not an accident that Aero is located so close to Ft. Bragg in
Fayetteville, NC. We are in the process of researching other Carolina
torture connections, and plan to issue a report this year.

Our task is really to arouse widespread
public opposition to extra-legal and abusive treatment of prisoners,
including torture. We are just part of a broader national movement to
rein in rendition. As a movement, we need to uproot the torture
network, and build support for human rights at home and abroad.

Local efforts to expose and shut down
the front companies like Aero would be helped by hearings in the U.S.
House and Senate. Some members, such as Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) and
Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT), have indicated possible interest in holding
hearings on rendition. We need to ensure that such hearings occur,
that they are extensive and public, and that the private contractor
issue is fully aired. We encourage everyone to contact Sen. Leahy
(Judiciary Committee office, phone 202-224-7703) and Rep. Nadler
(phone 202-225-5635) with this request.

RJ:
I assume that Aero is but one of several companies involved in this
process. Is your group familiar with some of the other companies
involved? If so, can you let the readers know in the hope that we can
shine a spotlight on these companies?

CC:
The web addresses for Bay Area anti-Jeppesen activists are given
above. To support anti-Bayard efforts in the Portland, Oregon, area,
email us at
stoptortureflights@riseup.net and we can put you in touch. The
Bill of Rights Defense Committee is a national organization, and their
activists are also working specifically on the CIA front called
Premier Executive Transport Services in Dedham, MA (www.bordc.org).

RJ:
Anything else to add?

CC:
North Carolina Stop Torture Now has a
website. No matter where you live, you can add your voice
to the call for North Carolina authorities to investigate